


thousand times i’ve fallen

by ratherbeyouthful



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: AU Canon Divergence, Donna Tartt Appreciation Squad, Getting Together, Henry is a Panicked Top, Hypothermia, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Richard is a Dumb Bitch, Sickfic (kind of), so enjoy one from henry’s perspective, thats all you really need to know, there are so many fics for this scene but I wanted something different
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:02:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26536252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ratherbeyouthful/pseuds/ratherbeyouthful
Summary: Richard burns bright, burns warm, and Henry realizes that he loves what he can consume.~Alternatively: Henry finds Richard at just the right time. What right means for the two of them, neither know.
Relationships: Richard Papen/Henry Winter
Comments: 26
Kudos: 157





	thousand times i’ve fallen

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter title from “Fire” by Barns Courtney. 
> 
> Real talk: I’d die for Donna Tartt. She deserves all respect and appreciation for these masterpieces she’s created. Appreciate her more please.

Henry returns from Italy with the unfortunate despair of a man who has lost control. It came in from the plane riding on his shoulders, blanketing his already miserable disposition. The worry is only exacerbated by his headache, which, though it has lessened over time, is still present at the base of his skull. Each time he moves, he loses all direction. 

So he goes to Julian, and spends days there, and recovers, but the worry does not leave him. While the physical pain departs, and he makes his way back to his common state of existence, Julian can still tell something has happened. 

Damn Bunny. Henry would much rather that Richard had discovered them. Someone with an easy temperament, with a rational mind, who would listen and assuredly keep their secret. Bunny possesses neither thought nor subtlety, no matter how much he believes himself to be a connoisseur of wit and flare. He has grated the nerves of each of his classmates, his fellow scholars, and if Henry sees him any time at all within the next two weeks it will be too soon. 

When Julian asks what troubles him, he understands that it’s time to take his leave. So he heads for his apartment and resettles himself into the familiar ground. This is the closest thing to safety that he can reach now, although his apartment is open to any visitors who know where he would be. Bunny, in particular, is what he has to take care of. Or rather, figure out how to keep him silent. What more can that fool want? Henry’s already emptied his savings and his bank accounts for the money-grubbing bastard, offered his time and his space and his treasure for the other. 

The problem is all-consuming, even when he can do nothing more about it but come to the conclusion that Bunny must be kept silent. Although he doesn't quite know how to accomplish it at the moment, there's a small inkling in the back of his mind that there is only one reassuring solution. And he doesn't like it at all. 

~

For however much others find cause to dislike him, he is not a bad person. The situation with the farmer was unfortunate, of course, but there was no harm intended at the outset of their bacchanal. It wasn't as if he and the others had meant to kill him. It was merely collateral damage of achieving the ecstasy they were in search of. The incident was regrettable, but he doesn’t believe it warrants the antagonistic tendencies Bunny has since displayed. 

At his apartment, he tries to distract himself with work. The last shreds of his headache are falling in wisps off his shoulders; the chip he carried off the plane from Italy is gone. But even the work, the translation of _Paradise Lost,_ does not help. He finds himself tapping his leg with the same fervency that Camilla _(lovely Camilla, beautiful and kind and cold, he almost misses her)_ does when she is forced to sit still. What could Bunny be doing, in Italy? How did he react when he woke up to discover Henry’s absence? What will come of it? 

With a sigh, he pushes away his papers and his pen, placing the Montblanc back in its holder. The work refuses to consume him. And he can’t be left alone with his thoughts before going out of his skin. Grabbing his overcoat off the hook, he slides it over his shoulders and pushes his glasses up his nose.

To Richard it shall be then. A veritable distraction. 

~

They never catch each other in time. Henry sees glimpses of Richard around, but the other disappears down Hampden’s drafty corridors before Henry can get a word in otherwise. That’s fine. It won’t always be that way. 

_Paradise Lost_ grows another couple pages. No one at the college, as ill-staffed as it is—really, Julian’s the only one who’s even qualified to teach, in his opinion—knows Richard’s whereabouts. Henry catches glimpses of his quarry through windows and walking across streets. The snow always blinds him. 

Richard always vanishes, like he was never there. 

~

He gets lucky, really, with all the same luck he’s had his whole life. Luck that’s born of dedication. Of persistence, the same persistence that’s let him move mountains. He finds, when asking where students have stayed over the winter term, that a hippie lets students stay for free. He doesn’t know why Richard would want to stay there, but the staff working the office assures him that a student asked about it. 

There’s one person Henry’s looking for. A need crawls under his skin sometimes, when his guard is relaxed, a need for a person not involved in this. He thought he would find it with Julian, but that hadn’t been the case. Richard, thoughtful and mysterious, with just a hint of naivety that Henry relishes. 

_(He wants to relish destroying it, too.)_

~

The drive to the hippie’s warehouse leads him through unpleasant weather and roads. He draws his overcoat tighter around himself, turning up the heat in his car. He hopes Richard has some hot tea at his home. 

The thought of tea makes him think of the bacchanal, and the bacchanal makes him think of the farmer shredded into the ground, and that makes him think of the duck that he shot and killed when they experimented with target practice, of his frayed nerves, of his nearly-upset stomach, of how even with his weak eyesight he saw too much. That makes him think of Richard’s subtle looks, reeking of his own soft sadness, the quick glances checking on him. Not nervous in the way Francis is, but more a quiet determination to look out for him. And really, Henry is so used to looking out for everyone else. 

Maybe it was just interest in seeing the leader fall. But Henry’s already fallen, already damned himself and the others. He may as well drag Richard with him. He pushes the duck from his mind and skids around a curve in the road, car protesting. 

_(The duck was the last time he’d been shaken when he was the cause of something’s end.)_

~

The hole in the ceiling is a window to a world he’ll never have. 

The room is small and bare, two suitcases and nothing else besides a creaking bed, ice stiff on the hole-ridden blankets. Henry’s boots crunch on layers of frost as he steps into the room. This is how Henry thought he’d be living after the bacchanal. Destitute and nameless, driven mad by guilt. Yet he feels nothing, nothing more than a casual regret. No remorse. It was an unfortunate thing to have happened. But he cannot change what has occurred. 

Richard, it seems, is cursed to live out his own fears so Henry doesn’t have to suffer them. 

He looks around the threadbare room, lights a cigarette, and lets the plume of smoke drift toward the sky. Gray and blank, muddled with falling snowflakes, easily destroyed. Lucky Strikes, a red bull’s-eye over his heart. A fleeting and nearly useless object, if he’s being honest. Snow. Winter. The loss of senses, death, the eternal blankness that will someday come for them all. How he awaits it. 

The sky sends down a promise. A blessing or curse, he cannot tell. What he does know: this is the only glimpse he will find of the above. 

_(Heaven’s in the sky, after all.)_

~

Richard must never know what he has done. Not until it’s time to send him crumbling, to wreck him apart. Henry has scores of ideas of how to go about it.

~

The door swings open with a melancholy creak, the last sighs of something that intimately holds knowledge of its own demise. Henry awaits Richard’s speech, still smoking toward the dishwater sky, and then realizes it may be the owner of this building, made aware that the luxurious car parked nearby does not belong to either resident. 

The lights come on with a snap and a hum, and Henry draws a thousand joking remarks—he’s feeling playful, with the snow, with his own damnation—wondering what practical joke Richard’s cooked up. Surely his parents wouldn’t be so averse to sending their son the money they cut him off from. 

He turns, and feels his mouth fall open. Shock rushes through him like a drug, all-consuming and with a sharp bite. Usually he’s better about hiding it. Usually he expects what he sees. 

Richard stands before him, sallow-faced, swaddled in mountainous layers of worn clothing that somehow only emphasize how thin he’s gotten. Ten or twenty pounds, melted off his body like wax from a candle. His cheekbones jut like knives from his face. In contrast to their sharpness, his eyes stare at Henry as if through several layers of film. Unfocused, barely processing his presence. He looks ruined, and not in the way Henry wants him to be. He wants to be in charge of his destruction. He can take no pleasure in the wrecking of the thin frame before him. 

He notices that Richard’s lips are nearly blue. It’s as much surprise as he’s felt in a long time. No one can stun him quite this easily. Richard, he’s coming to understand, breaks so many of the rules they thought to be iron. 

Richard makes a noise, and Henry waits for him to say something. Now that he’s adjusting to his shock, he can’t move past the fact that Richard looks one step away from death. And— _oh_ —is that blood on his face? 

“Good God, Richard,” he says, words foreign in his own mouth. Strange that he would ask. What taxed this boy while he was gone? “What’s happened to you?” 

~

Richard grasps at the door frame, blinking. His glass-eyed gaze slides over Henry, and he opens his mouth to answer. Instead, he sways, and falls to the snow-covered ground. Henry leaps forward to catch him, broad hands latching around the fabric engulfing him. He grips onto the clothes when he expects to feel the solid mass of Richard beneath his fingers. Something about his friend escapes him, lost in the pressure to act. 

He ends up sinking to the ground with Richard, lying him down gently to make up for being unable to break his fall entirely. The other blinks feverishly under him, trembling with all the force of an earthquake. Henry smooths his hands down his friend’s shoulders, and Richard shakes under him. When he gets to the ends of the coat sleeves, Henry starts. The skin of Richard’s wrist is colder even than the snow. Henry, who associates Richard with warmth, with sunlight and humidity and summer, is jarred. 

Black overcoat is removed from his shoulders. He lays it down atop Richard as fast as he can, shivering himself as the cold bites deeper. His concern grows, a festering displeasure he’ll have to rid himself of. The lapel of the coat gets tucked around Richard’s neck. As Henry touches a hand to Richard’s pulse-point, he feels the erratic rate. Richard cannot die on him.

Though without the ability to stand, Richard remains conscious, if not alert. His hand grasps weakly at the coat draping his frame. Henry’s hand bumps into the side of his mouth, and snow that collected on his cuff drops onto Richard’s face. Still retaining some motor functions, Richard drags his hand up to wipe at his mouth. 

“Where did you come from?” Richard mumbles from the floor. Henry understands him only because of the close proximity to his mouth. He goes to brush snow from Richard’s hair, his ears like ice, and startles again in surprise and curiosity when his fingers come away coated in blood. He’d expected light spotting, of course. Not this veneer covering the entirety of where he touches. 

“I left Italy early,” Henry says, brushing back Richard’s hair to find where the blood stems from. His reassurance and unhurried movements stem from the knowledge that head wounds bleed in large volumes. He thinks he would recognize something serious, considering his own condition. He wonders how the other got the injury. Had he fainted before on his way to this warehouse? Had someone attacked him?

What is Richard doing here? 

“Some place I've got here,” Richard whispers, a cross between a mumble and a moan. He laughs after, and Henry stops fussing with his hair to stare at him for a moment. 

Richard is hypothermic, delirious, and concussed. He’s barely present, holding onto Henry’s sleeve with a failing grip. Consciousness will soon escape him, if clarity hasn't fled already. Henry looks up at the sky, grey and thankless and forbidding, and tosses a quick curse to his long-ignored Catholic faith.

“Yes,” he says, grey sky staring forbiddingly down at him. Richard’s grasp on his cuff weakens, and he looks back at his recumbent friend. “Like the Pantheon,” Henry mutters, and bends back over Richard’s head. Reaching into the pocket of his greatcoat, he removes a pressed handkerchief that at one point was forgotten by Francis. Henry’s glad he didn't get the chance to return it. It spots with blood quickly, much faster than he expected, but once the initial absorption has finished he realizes the bleeding seems to be slowing down. The next question: is that due to clotting, or the cold? He’ll have to take him to his house, see if the cut needs stitches, wrap him in blankets with the spare space-heater and hold him if he needs to, until his lips have stopped featuring that frightening blue shade. 

He goes to ask Richard when he got the cut, and realizes that Richard’s hand at some point slipped from his shirtsleeve into the snow. Richard stares up at the hole in the ceiling, wide eyed and unblinking. He trembles still, violently and startlingly. He seems so impossibly small. 

_(Henry likes small things.)_

~

“Richard,” he says sternly. Trying to elicit a response. Richard shows no signs of having heard him. “Richard, I need you to answer me.”

Instead, his friend’s eyes begin to slide closed. Henry tries to find the pulse-point again in his bitterly cold neck, and starts for a moment when he feels nothing. There. Slow and fluttering. “Richard, stay awake,” he says, in lieu of any other ideas short of slapping him. With the probable concussion, he doesn’t think that prudent. He knows that saying a person’s name catches their attention, especially if they’re on the other side of the room and you speak only in harsh whispers. He doesn’t think Greek would be appropriate at this time. Henry would be able to think through it. Richard, however, does not possess that same capability. 

“Richard,” he says again, and watches his friend’s head roll toward him. “It took a lot of time to track you down. Don’t make it cost me by passing out again.” Richard makes no response. Henry taps his cheek lightly, bitter cold against his fingertips. His prone friend leans desperately into the touch. Out of it but still slightly aware. He won't remember a thing for sure. Probably won’t recall past fainting. 

Henry’s words are brusque and ugly. He tries to cushion them so Richard doesn't retreat from him. “Stay with me. Richard.” The other’s eyes slide open, Richard’s cheek cradled in the palm of Henry’s hand. Is that snow on his lashes? Blue on his lips? “That’s it. Good.” He considers his options, and in that incremental period of seconds, Richard slips away from him again. 

~

A wheeze interrupts his train of thought, and he notices for the first time Richard’s labored breathing underneath all that clothing. Hospital. That’s where he needs to take him. Not to the space-heater in Henry’s apartment, not to the school to demand an answer why Richard was living in those conditions. The hospital, treatment, and stitches for the sluggishly-bleeding cut. There’s blood on his shirt, staining the white. No matter. There’s always blood on something these days. 

“Stay awake,” he says, and Richard’s eyes flutter open. Henry reaches for his hand, squeezes it tightly, and frowns when all Richard manages is a faint twitch of his fingers. “Never thought you’d be one to drop,” he says, trying to tease, trying to do something, just to get him to stay awake. Richard groans, quiet in his throat, and Henry smoothes a shaking hand across Richard’s ice-cold forehead. The winter has begun to get to him too. 

“Sorry,” Richard mumbles, in a much different state than he was even a moment before, remarking on the state of his place. Henry doesn’t indulge him. He needs to get him out of here. 

“Can you put your arm around my neck?” Henry asks, reminiscent of the time Camilla had split her foot open. Blood had spattered his trousers, left him stained and euphoric. He had carried her to shore and pulled glass shards from the sole of her foot. Richard had watched in fascinated horror. Henry wants to see that look on his face again. 

Richard moves feebly, and Henry moves his ice-cold hands around the back of his neck, props up his knees. Pulls him to his chest, the dead weight of him not that much. Heaves himself to his feet. 

“‘M falling,” Richard mutters, trembling in his arms, and Henry pries the door wider with his foot. 

“You’re not,” he says, “I decide when you fall.” 

~

Richard drifts in and out of consciousness on the drive to Montpelier. Henry talks to him, tells him to stay awake, stops the car several times to make sure he’s still breathing. Turns him on his side once when he begins wheezing, not sure if he should. Breaks more traffic laws than usual to get there. Vermont’s empty anyway. 

He walks into the emergency room with an unconscious man in his arms, feeling the cold of Richard’s still body through the layers of clothing, through his black overcoat. The nurses spring to action and Henry eases Richard onto a gurney. He does not let him fall. 

~

The doctor tells him that he saved Richard’s life. Henry snorts. 

_(He doesn’t save lives, he saves them for later.)_

~

Richard is delirious for hours. Calls for Henry, calls for Francis, calls for Camilla and Bunny and Charles and someone named Judy, although he doesn’t really want her, just asks her what she gave him. A past or repeating occurrence, no doubt. 

He twists and turns and manages to dislodge two of the tubes in his arms, so Henry finds a nurse and talks to his friend, low timbre the rumble of water, the grating of a glacier. He permits himself, when the nurse exits, to run a hand over Richard’s hair, avoiding the stitches given to his cut. Doesn’t let himself leave, not even to change clothes. No one should wake up in a hospital alone. 

~

They have a heated blanket over Richard, but he’s still shivering. His hands feel like ice. Henry doesn’t know how one person can be so cold. 

~

Richard comes to consciousness one day, for the span of half an hour. In that time, Henry gets a glass of water into him, a bit of solid food, and tells Richard he has severe hypothermia and pneumonia. Richard’s mind still seems foggy. He has the heated blanket pulled up over his shoulders, but he trembles fiercely. He’s stabilized, the doctor told Henry, but he’ll be cold for a long time.

“Looking at you makes me cold,” Henry says. Richard looks over the blankets at him, exhausted. The area under his eyes is grey. His hair has matted and only remains parted where Henry had his hand in it. 

“ _Being_ me makes me cold,” Richard mumbles, shoulders curled. With effort, he rolls on his side to face Henry completely. “It’s exhausting.” 

“Try to rest,” Henry says, and Richard gives a particularly violent shiver. The shiver is accompanied by a cough, harsh and wracking. It lasts for ages, in that position, on his side. Henry shifts in his seat, but Richard shakes his head as he hacks. It subsides slowly, and he sinks back onto the pillow. His head is tilted at an angle, his throat bared to the concrete ceiling. If Henry were a man of lesser impulses, he might trail his mouth along it. If Richard wasn’t in the hospital, he might do it anyway. 

“Too cold,” Richard says, and lapses into another fit of coughs. Scratching noise bursts from his lips, and he struggles onto his elbows. Henry moves from his chair, sliding a hand underneath Richard’s neck and the other sitting him up. He slides a pillow behind him and doesn’t move his hands as Richard shudders and wheezes under him. He’s still trembling. 

“Scoot over,” Henry says, and nudges Richard until there’s enough room on the hospital bed to sit. Richard lets out a few more bouts of coughing, and Henry supports him through it until Richard collapses back against the pillow (in a dreadful state; Henry makes a note to bring him one from his apartment when Richard’s well enough that Henry can feel comfortable leaving him here alone). Henry tries to slow his slump on the way down, but doesn’t succeed. He manages to move one of his hands. The other, behind Richard’s shoulders, becomes pinned to the mattress. 

“Henry,” Richard mumbles deliriously, and then, to Henry’s complete and utter bafflement, sinks into his shoulder. Henry shifts to accommodate him, closing his expression off from surprise. He never thought Richard would be forward. He’s just cold and delirious. His cheek is chilled against the skin of Henry’s neck. 

“Do I need to call for a nurse?” Henry asks. Richard shakes his head, eyes closing, shivering.

“Can you stay?” 

“I haven’t been anywhere but here.” He adjusts until he’s reclined against the pillows, pulling Richard half onto his chest instead. “Rest now.”

“Okay.” 

By the tone of his voice, Henry’s certain Richard won’t remember a thing come the next time he wakes. So he sits patiently, runs his hand through Richard’s hair, down his cheek, down his arm, until the trembling subsides and Richard’s skin grows warm under his touch. After minutes, he’s sure Richard is deeply asleep. He slides out from under him in increments, taking great care to smooth the blanket around him and make sure he isn’t lying awkwardly. The cloth is cool to his touch, and he frowns. 

When he walks to the side of the bed, it isn’t plugged in. With a scowl, he reinserts the cable and watches carefully to make sure it’s functional. Task completed, he sits back in his seat and resumes his vigil.

~

Richard remembers nothing when he wakes. Henry recounts his injuries, recounts his return from Italy, offers to call Richard’s parents. Brings him books and clothes because Richard looks uncomfortable in the thin hospital gown, gets him sodas when he asks, and reads, lost in a book, sneaking glances when Richard doesn’t notice. He pushes aside the feeling of how terribly Richard had shook underneath his hands, a deathly shiver that Henry loathes to remember. 

There are bad nights, one or two in the four that they spend, where Richard can’t sleep for the ache in his lungs, and can barely breathe. Henry stays up for those, silent as per his usual demeanor, speaking stiltedly about Greek history when Richard’s face goes white with pain. Doesn’t dare touch his hair again, or sit on his bed and pull him into his shoulder. Doesn’t do a thing but exist near him and hope that somewhere, it’s enough. 

~

He wonders why he cares so much. After what they’ve done, he should be absent from his mind, from the human brain’s capacity to care. But he supposes that there’s always a person or two that one cannot remove from the heart. He is Achilles, proud and untouchable save for a few. Is Richard his Patroclus, or his Briseis? How different were the two, really, except for clandestine practices?

~

_(Richard burns bright, burns warm, and Henry realizes that he loves what he can consume.)_

~

He makes Richard take his bed. There’s something about the thought of it, of having Richard sleep on a pull-out bed when he nearly died that doesn’t sit well with Henry. Richard is something new in this empty house of his, and while he’s content to live alone with no company and occasional excursions to visit Francis, Bunny, and the twins, there’s something about having Richard rooms away, living there, existing more intimately in his sphere than before, that makes him decide to have him stay. 

~

Henry makes dinner sometimes, not like what Francis makes, nothing ostentatious or requiring more than a superficial knowledge of culinary practices. Potatoes, chicken, the occasional bowl of vegetables with melted Parmesan and olive oil spread liberally on top. Things that require no effort, not that Henry would have attempted more ambitious dishes. Richard seems glad enough of it, and Henry wonders what he ate while everyone else had been away.

He still is not sure what Richard remembers. 

~

He figures it out one day, when Richard sits farther than normal and won’t meet his eyes. Henry raises an eyebrow at the action, and brings it to question. What had happened?

“I feel like I should apologize to you,” Richard says meekly, with as much of a casual air as he can bring to the words. Henry mulls the statement over, wondering how he should proceed. What words would result in which outcome. What Richard needs to hear, what he himself feels like saying. What he wants. It wasn’t an apology, not really. Richard is testing the waters, testing _Henry_ , and he intends to reverse the roles until Richard is confident he'll only win if Henry lets him. 

“Interesting,” Henry says eventually, when over a minute has passed. If he’s right, he could get what he wants. That’s his goal, of course, despite the lack of ambition that he has. “Why would you say that?” 

“Everything at the hospital,” Richard rushes, fiddling with the hem of his button-up. Now that Henry looks, it might be one Francis handed down to him. Henry instantly feels assured of it. 

“You’ll have to elaborate, Richard.” He knows he’s being cruel. Half-enjoys it, at that. 

Richard stares at him, flushing. He’s still pale from pneumonia, from four days of convalescence and the extended hospital stay. Those places have a way of draining the life from those who enter. Henry still feels apprehensive about them sometimes. 

“You can’t mean—Henry,” Richard says. “You know what I’m talking about.” So he remembers, then. After days of pretending it didn’t happen, he’s finally ready to talk. 

“Afraid not,” he says, making sure a cruel grin doesn’t spread across his face. It isn’t like this with Camilla, lovely and light and just game enough for anything. He wonders if Richard will be too. Of course, what he had with Camilla comes and goes, only when he reminds himself that he is but a man, weakened by the desires of the flesh. This is something only a god could take. 

Henry watches him: parted lips, wide eyes, blush creeping over his ears. His toes fidget on the ground. He stutters out something unintelligible, and Henry’s tempted to have pity on him. 

Richard looks up, eyes worried, and bites his lip. “Jog my memory,” Henry says coldly, and Richard holds his gaze for a moment before looking down. He ducks his head, exactly as Henry remembers. 

_(There’s something euphoric about having what no one else should touch.)_

~

Henry Winter has been surprised very few times in his life. 

The most several recent, if he cares to remember, rank in chronological order and, laughably, in order from least to greatest surprise: a new student admitted to Julian’s class, the murder during the bacchanal, Bunny’s discovery of their misdeeds, and Richard’s near-death by unforgiving Vermont winter. He does not expect to be surprised within such a short interval of time between one and the next. But he is. 

Richard kisses him full on the mouth, quick and insistent and gone immediately. Henry gapes at him, mouth open, seeing the events over in his mind like a movie reel. Richard scoots back against the couch, eyes panicked. 

“Sorry,” he says, apologetically Francis-like. He’s got less of the defense Francis would throw up at the moment, and Henry likes that. 

“Richard,” he says, and Richard looks up at him. He is still, like a deer in headlights, like the deer Henry thought he saw during the bacchanal, something he thought he was going to chase and pursue until it was not possible any longer. Something he could ruin. “Come here.”

At his words Richard eases himself from the corner of the couch, scoots a little closer. Henry draws him in with a hand on his arm, not asking permission. He knows by now he doesn’t need it. Richard gives a small shiver, one Henry equates to anticipation and anxiety rather than cold. 

Henry kisses him, brief and perfunctory, and Richard tenses under his hands in surprise. He pulls away only to dive right back in, Richard’s chapped lips against his own, his hand sliding up through Richard’s hair. He tugs at it lightly, just a test, nothing more than a gentle movement, and Richard melts into him, kisses him harder. 

Henry pulls away, and Richard leans forward unconsciously, face even redder when he realizes he’s chased it. “That wasn’t what I was expecting,” Henry says. Richard, clearly done with talking, pushes Henry back a little, climbs into his lap. Henry grins, hands sliding to Richard’s hips, tugging the button-up from where it’s tucked into his pants. “You’re not what I was expecting. I thought you would be, but you surprised me.” 

“You choose now to talk?” Richard huffs, and then grabs onto Henry’s shoulders tightly as the other kisses the line of his throat, his jaw, the space behind his ear. It’s pleasing to see him react so openly when all his time at Hampden he’s remained closed off. It’s nice. A little piece of normal Henry could hold onto. Maybe he will. 

“Henry,” Richard says, wrestling with the buttons of his shirt, fingers catching because of the distraction. “Shouldn’t we talk about this?” 

“We’ll talk later,” Henry says, grinning wickedly into Richard’s collarbone. “When you‘re able.” 

~

They kiss a lot. More than Henry thought he would, more than he does with Camilla. Henry likes it, wants to do it more. He spends the rest of the break absolutely _ruining_ Richard, in every way he can think of. He’s always had an active imagination. It’s nice to put it to use. 

He sleeps back in his own bed, Richard by his side, and they wake up later and later, breaking Henry’s routine. He thinks, eventually, that he’ll tell Richard about the bacchanal, about the farmer they killed. For now, he’s too enamoured with burying his face in Richard’s neck and destroying him, with listening to him shower Henry in praise and then fall silent as drowsiness takes over. 

It’s nice. Something he wants to keep as long as he can. 

~

Sunlight falls in slats through his kitchen window. Richard stands at the stove, up earlier than even Henry is. That’s an unusual occurrence, since Henry rises with the sun. There’s a delicious smell, something that Henry recognizes from mornings in the country house. 

Henry pulls down a cup from the cabinet, filling it with water. He takes a drink and stands next to Richard, just watching him. Taking him in, the smell and shape of him, the sight of him in Henry’s shirt and pajama pants, makes him more sentimental than he’s felt in months. 

He kisses the top of his head, arm wrapping around his thin waist, plucking at the hem. Richard smiles, pushes him slightly, this his head back and kisses Henry firmly. They say nothing, no words or questions needed for Henry to understand what he needs and what he wants. So he kisses him softly, long and slow and deep, until Richard pulls away with a sigh and goes back to breakfast. Henry’s never seen him cook before. 

They move together in silence, in tandem, a dance around each other. Henry reads and tidies up his kitchen while Richard stares contemplatively at the pancakes on the griddle. Henry doesn’t know where he found it. He doesn’t know where Richard found the ingredients, either, and he was the one who went grocery shopping. Eventually, the pancakes are done, slightly burnt, and Henry stifles a smile at Richard’s frown. 

“They’re perfect,” he says, completely unlike himself, reaching down to thread his fingers through Richard’s hair. It’s not what he means to say, but he’s glad he said it. Richard smiles, pulls him down, kisses him. It’s like nothing he’s ever had. 

“Good morning,” he says. And it is. 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope everyone enjoyed! Please leave your feedback in the comments, or leave kudos! Even if you just want yell about how these boys are such chaotic messes. I’m down for anything with them, pretty much. There are so few fics on here for this fandom and I’m baffled. Everyone please write one, I’ll read anything. I’ve read everything already and it’s only been a day.


End file.
